The Pandemic Diaries May 29, 2020
It’s Tommy, and I’m back. Holy Shit! Here I thought things couldn’t get worse. I’ve never been so wrong in my life.
This dude in Minneapolis was killed by Minneapolis police. That shouldn’t have happened. The police officer who knelt on the dude’s neck should be tried for murder. I don’t know a single person who isn’t outraged, and it seems everyone in the country is in agreement that this was a tragedy and police brutality involving African-Americans needs to be stopped. The victim, George Floyd, deserves justice.
Here’s where things get fucked up. We’re all in agreement, right? So, who are the protesters trying to convince? YES, LOGAN, I HEAR YOU, IT’S WHOM. NOW SHUT UP. Sorry about that, my husband corrects me about once a day, which is once too often. No, we’re not having a crisis in our marriage, I’m just satisfied with the state of my grammar. Logan isn’t, which I think is his problem.
So, we all agree this was a bad thing. I don’t need convincing. The mob is angry about police targeting unarmed black men for death. My brother, Antoine, looked into it and found a database that listed every police-caused fatality from last year. He found nine unarmed black men killed by police the whole last year. That’s nine too many, but it doesn’t sound like there’s unlimited racist brutality among the police.
In Minneapolis, a police station was burned down, and the Mayor ordered the police not to stop the mob. This is crazy. I wonder what half-baked ideas Mayor Lightbrain is going to come up with. There are crowds roaming the streets, despite lockdown orders because of the virus. The city ordered police to disperse crowds protesting the lockdown, and Lightbrain has ordered police not to use force to disperse people protesting this dude’s death. I stopped believing there was much science behind most of what our city and state are doing some time ago. This is just the cherry on top of the Sundae.
People are complaining about inequality for African-Americans, and I agree. We’ve tried to fix it for nearly sixty years now, just throwing money at it. It isn’t working. I’m not smart enough to know what we should be doing. I am, though, smart enough to know that if what you’re doing isn’t working, you should stop it and try something else. One of our black team members sent an e-mail to everyone on the team complaining about being oppressed. I answered it asking if being forced to take $8 million a year was part of the oppression. I hit reply all. Probably time to lay low for a while.
The shooting has started already in Chicago. This isn’t going to be good at all. There are protests all over the country about this. I agree that the inequality should be addressed, and that police brutality should be wiped out. I’ll be happy to march and carry a sign for that. But we’ve now got the clinic open four days a week to the public because of people getting trampled, hit by thrown rocks, and one poor guy caught fire when protesters threw some sort of fireworks at him. How does that help bring equality?
It’s my turn to make dinner, so I gotta go. I have forty-seven recipes that I’ve mastered. Creamy peanut butter and jelly on white bread, crunchy peanut butter and jelly on white bread, and forty-five variations. I’m adding pickles and potato chips to be sure it’s a balanced meal. See you in two weeks.
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